Syria poses challenge for new US envoy at UN

Samantha Power, President Barack Obama choice for next UN Ambassador, speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Wednesday,June 5, 2013, after the president made the announcement. Power is a fiery human rights advocate who has famously taken presidents to task for refusing to use military force to stop genocide. Nominated as the next U.N. ambassador, she may have to bite her tongue as the Obama administration resists getting drawn into Syria. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
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Samantha Power, President Barack Obama choice for next UN Ambassador, speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Wednesday,June 5, 2013, after the president made the announcement. Power is a fiery human rights advocate who has famously taken presidents to task for refusing to use military force to stop genocide. Nominated as the next U.N. ambassador, she may have to bite her tongue as the Obama administration resists getting drawn into Syria. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
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President Barack Obama walks from the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, June 5, 2013, with, from left, Samantha Power, his nominee to be the next UN Ambassador, current UN Ambassador Susan Rice, his choice to be his next National Security Adviser, and outgoing National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, after the president made the announcement. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)— AP

President Barack Obama walks from the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, June 5, 2013, with, from left, Samantha Power, his nominee to be the next UN Ambassador, current UN Ambassador Susan Rice, his choice to be his next National Security Adviser, and outgoing National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, after the president made the announcement. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
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WASHINGTON 
Fiery human rights advocate Samantha Power has famously taken presidents to task for refusing to use military force to stop genocide. But as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Power may need to bite her tongue as the Obama administration resists being drawn into Syria.

Those who know her well describe Power, 42, as vociferously passionate about confronting international atrocities, berating those who in her mind sit idly by. In 2008, Power called then-presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton a "monster." A year earlier, she disparaged U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's work in Darfur as "disappointing."

And in an article she wrote in 2001, titled "Bystanders to Genocide," Power hammered those who put politics ahead of peacekeeping in Rwanda - including, she said, Susan Rice, the woman with whom she shared a podium Wednesday as she was nominated as the next U.N. ambassador. Rice was named President Barack Obama's national security adviser at the same ceremony.

"To those who care deeply about America's engagement and indispensable leadership in the world, you will find no stronger advocate for that cause than Samantha," Obama told reporters in announcing the nomination.

Rice has been pilloried by Republicans in Congress during her time as U.N. ambassador for initially saying that the September 2012 attacks against a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, likely were spontaneous, which turned out to be wrong. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the attack.

Power, a native Dubliner who grew up in Pittsburgh and Atlanta, likely will have an even harder time watching her words. Reflecting on her time in the early 1990s as a war correspondent in Bosnia, Power said she returned to the U.S. "very sort of dispirited about the power of the pen, very dispirited about the United States and foreign policy."

"The battle to stop genocide is lost in the realm of domestic politics," Power said in the same June 2002 interview with C-SPAN, to discuss her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide." "And that is where it can be won - if it's to be won."

Her self-written book summary was even more blunt: "The United States has never intervened to stop genocide," she wrote.

Most governments have been careful not to label the civil war in Syria, which has killed more than 70,000 people and is not now in its third year, as genocide. Qatar and Turkey, however, have accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of committing war crimes against his people. And rebel fighters who are pleading in vain with the White House for weapons and other military aid have accused the regime of launching a "massive genocide" across the country.

The White House has shown little interest in supplying the rebels with arms or using U.S. force directly against Assad. How Power will balance her past of pushing for U.S. intervention against Obama's current recalcitrance on Syria - and not get caught in a domestic political dispute over it - will be a delicate line for her to walk at the United Nations.